This intensely personal, passionately inspired book will appeal to anyone who has loved Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, I Capture the Castle, the work of Ali Smith or Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood.

‘Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist…’

Men were forbidden from Sally’s childhood home. Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea, her world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies in colourful clothes and sandals trailed through the kitchen looking for God. Their leader was Sally’s Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When her baby brother vanishes from his pram, Sally becomes suspicious of the activities going on around her. What really happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go?

Disappearing into a world of books and reading, Sally adopts the tried and tested methods of Miss Marple. Taking books for hints and clues, she turns herself into a reading detective. She discovers the character of Jane Eyre, another curious detective – marking the beginning of a vivid journey through Victorian literature, where she finds the kind and eccentric figure of Charles Dickens’s Betsy Trotwood. These heroines become part of an alternative family, offering humour and guidance during many difficult moments in Sally’s life.

Weaving literary classics with a young girl’s coming of age story, nursery rhymes and folklore, this book testifies to the transformative power of reading and the literary imagination. Mixing fairy tale, literary classics, nursery rhymes and folklore, it is the story of a child’s adventure in wonderland and search for truth in an adult world often cast in deep shadow.

‘What an astonishing, funny, shocking and inventive book. Sally Bayley is an extraordinarily clever and versatile writer. Thoroughly enjoyable.’

          Alexander Masters, author of Stuart and A Life Discarded

'A dark, funny, heartbreaking memoir which celebrates the power of literature to transform, inform and comfort.'

Alice Jolly, author of Dead Babies, winner of the Ackerley Prize 2016

‘Into the burgeoning genre of writing about the power of books to shape our lives comes a wholly new and mesmerising voice: Sally Bayley writes through the eyes of a child living a very strange childhood as convincingly as the Dickens of ‘David Copperfield’’

Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare, Ted Hughes and John Clare

‘Be warned: here be dragons. Girl With Dove flies off the map. Charting the odyssey of its bibliophilic heroine’s imagination, it treats us to age-old bildungsroman pleasures. Bittersweet, tragicomic terrain, with flashes of the familiar and the universal against the quirky, murky landscape of this girl’s singular childhood. But Girl With Dove is more than a memoir: a detective story, a mystery, a magical and strange genealogy. Darkly enthralling and yet sparkling, painful and yet funny, this book is dizzyingly many things at once.’

Andrea Ashworth, author of Once In a House on Fire

Sally Bayley is a Teaching and Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and from September 2018 she will be teaching writing in Oxford as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Sally has written widely on visual responses to literature, including a jointly authored study of Sylvia Plath's relationship to the visual arts: Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual and a study of Plath as a cultural icon: Representing Sylvia Plath. In 2010 she completed a cross-media study of Emily Dickinson as a way of thinking about America's relationship to space and place: Home on the Horizon: America's Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan. She is the author of The Private Life of the Diary (Unbound, 2016) -a book on the role of the diary in public and private life.